How Does that Make You Feel? Development and Pilot Testing of Two New Instruments Measuring Emotional Attributions to Experiences of Childhood Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

Though prior research has demonstrated that survivors of childhood sexual abuse may experience a range of negative emotions following the abuse, studies have failed to consider the conflicting, ambivalent, or positive emotions being attributed to the experiences by survivors. The current study describes the development and piloting of two new scales to capture the positive and negative emotions that youth may attribute to experiences of childhood sexual abuse. A sample of youth (N = 136) were recruited and surveyed from community corrections and residential treatment centers in a Midwestern state. Item Response Theory was used to test the performance of the measures and their individual items with the subsample of youth who reported a history of childhood sexual abuse (n = 40). Both new measures demonstrated high internal consistency reliability and appropriately captured the range of positive and negative emotions youth may experience following childhood sexual abuse. Findings indicate that youth who have experienced childhood sexual abuse may have conflicting positive and negative emotions associated with the experiences. Implications for measurement refinement, future research directions, and clinical practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood sexual abuse
• psychometrics
• item response theory
• emotional attributions
• measurement
• maltreatment

Acknowledgments

The author takes responsibility for the integrity of the data, the accuracy of the data analyses, and has made every effort to avoid inflating statistically significant results.

I would like to express my gratitude to my mentors, Dr. Kathryn Maguire-Jack (University of Michigan) and Dr. Jamie Yoder (Colorado State University), for their ongoing guidance and support, as well as to my colleague, Dr. Katherine Marçal (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) for her editorial recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Ohio State Behavioral and Social Sciences, Protocol #2018X0033) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent and assent (as appropriate) were obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an external grant from The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Logue Bosetti

Rebecca Logue Bosetti, MSW, PhD is an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, School of Social Work. Rebecca graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology & Sociology and a Certificate in the Helping Professions from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. Rebecca completed her Master of Social Work with a specialization in Child & Youth Services at The Ohio State University in 2017. Rebecca was the recipient of the University Fellowship from The Ohio State University in the 2015-2016 academic year. Rebecca completed her PhD in Social Work at The Ohio State University in 2020 after defending her dissertation entitled Maltreatment, Emotional Responses to Abuse, and Trauma Among Adolescents Engaging in Sexual or Non-Sexual Delinquency. Rebecca’s dissertation proposal received funding through the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers Pre-doctoral Research Grant. Rebecca’s research explores developmental antecedents to juvenile delinquency behaviors, the role of childhood maltreatment victimization and trauma in the etiology of adolescent offending, and risk factors that differentiate youth who commit general delinquent offenses from youth who engage in sexually abusive behaviors.